Tube Stakes

It’s our Presidential year and France’s, too—as the election over there approaches (round one, April 22nd; the nearly certain runoff, May 6th)—France’s newspapers, like ours, are looking at the candidates from every conceivable angle (albeit with far less invasive attention to their private lives). In Le Monde, Raphaëlle Bacqué has a good piece on the candidates’ cultural inclinations, which suggests an interesting perspective on our own contenders. She cites the current president, the rightist Nicolas Sarkozy, who admitted in the run-up to the 2007 elections, “I’m an immigrant without a diploma. I need Henri [Guaino, his speechwriter] to bring me the France of Péguy and Michelet.” (She also reports that Sarkozy’s main opponent, the Socialist François Hollande, once said that he “never reads novels.”) But, of course, French politics have always been inseparable from French culture, and Sarkozy did his best to define his sense of culture in purely populist political terms: “A politician who doesn’t watch TV can’t know the French.”

There will be another occasion to talk at length about the rich history of French politicians’ cultural heritage; for now, the question is: what about American politicians? What do our own candidates watch, read, and listen to in their spare time? Is this a question that journalists regularly pose? And—an altogether different matter—what cultural activities, if any, do candidates make a point of publicizing? Has there been a screening of “The Hunger Games” at the White House? When Republican candidates see it, do they extrapolate from it the right to bear arms as a bastion against tyrannical usurpation? Are there lessons that they—or their staff—extract from “American Idol,” wrestling, and other broad-based entertainments? For that matter, does the atomization of mass culture through the Internet, cable television, and home video suggest a new approach to political persuasion that candidates are attempting to put into practice—and that itself suggests the pointlessness, here, of Sarkozy’s populist counsel?

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